The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
The development and deployment of internet of things (IoT) devices has proceeded with remarkable speed in the past several years. IoT devices are diverse, including everything from controllers of industrial equipment to smart watches and personal activity monitors. However, security infrastructure has not kept pace with the huge number and wide use of these devices. Some analysts estimate that billions of such devices will be operating and connected to internetworks within a few years, but there is presently no effective security architecture that can efficiently permit IoT devices to be secured, yet readily usable. Key constraints in this technical field have included limited processing power, limited memory, limited or absent user interface elements, and limited and intermittent network connectivity. All these characteristics of IoT devices make them difficult to integrate into existing security systems. At the same time, misuse of IoT devices could be catastrophic by permitting an attacker or unauthorized user to gain control of industrial equipment or other systems that have embedded IoT devices.
Industrial and commercial operators are currently deploying millions of IoT devices in various enterprise environments. These IoT devices often use different data communication protocols to communicate. In previous approaches, security measures have been data protocol-dependent, making these security techniques difficult to universally apply to devices that communicate using different protocols. Moreover, previous security techniques often required prior knowledge of malware signatures and attack patterns, which limited the effectiveness of such security techniques in preventing previously unknown attacks.
Thus, there is a need for decreasing the network and computing processing burden of implementing various data protocol-dependent security measures by using a data protocol-agnostic device health check system. There is also a need for better security breach detection and protection that is not dependent on known malware signatures and attack patterns. There is also a need for a secure method of storing and accessing device information that is tolerant of security breaches.